Sunday Night Journal — February 20, 2011
The January issue of The New Criterion
includes a symposium called “The Anglosphere and the future of
liberty.” It’s been on my mind a good deal since the
issue arrived some weeks ago.
“The Anglosphere,” in
case you haven’t encountered the term, refers
to the English-speaking world, to all the nations
which have their political roots and some significant cultural roots
in England, even if the connection began with conquest. It includes, obviously, the USA, Australia, and New
Zealand, and a good many other former colonies of the British
Empire. The broad thesis of the symposium can be summed up in this
sentence from Mark Steyn’s contribution, “Dependence
Day”:
We are coming to the end of a
two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and
prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but
which in fact derive from a particular cultural inheritance and may
well not survive it.
What we call the modern world,
say the contributors, has been in very large part shaped by the
combination of constitutional government, technological innovation, and capitalism which
is particularly characteristic of the English-speaking nations.
That’s a very broad statement, and one can immediately begin a
list of contributions toward that sort of development which came from
other peoples, and of nations which have adopted the general pattern
at least as successfully. But it does strike me as a defensible
generalization. (If you broaden the category from the Anglosphere to
include the Nordic countries, it’s even more defensible, and if
you make it Europe and nations rooted in Europe, it doesn’t
even need much qualification.) As Steyn says, “We forget how
rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer
still outside the Anglosphere.”
Steyn is a polemicist, and I
don’t agree with everything he says in his piece. He includes a
few overly-simplisitic or sensational jibes, and in general is
certainly not concerned with doing justice to the opposing case. But
he raises a serious and important question. Granting that his
characterization of the Anglosphere’s role in making the modern
world is at least a defensible generalization, what will happen if
those nations become incapable and/or unwilling to do and to be what
they have been? We have seen in the last two centuries a continuing
trend toward the recognition of individual rights, the rule of law,
and representative government. Most of us consider that to be
progress, whether or not we applaud every aspect of modernity, although like any form of progress it has its defects and
proceeds in a zig-zag way, not in a straight line, with rights gained
here and lost there. And sometimes, as is particularly the case in the U.S. and
Great Britain now, it becomes cancerous, so that the right to vote
becomes the same thing as the right to paint a butterfly on your cheek
which becomes the same thing as making pornography. Steyn notes a
case which represents the reductio ad absurdum of this, in which the
government of the U.K. paid for a man with learning disabilities to
fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute—because, of course, he had a
right to sex. (Why he had not been able to procure it on his own was
not made clear.)
But what struck me most from Steyn’s piece, and has
been most on my mind, is this: “...you cannot wage a sustained
ideological assault on your own civilization without profound
consequences.”
It is typically those who argue
for the institution of a sort of extreme version of human rights,
which involves not so much liberty of action as the
equation of liberty with the satisfaction of all wants and the duty
of the state to provide it, who are least respectful of the actual
history and traditions of human rights as understood in the
Anglosphere. They tend to see history as a parade of injustices: the
most notable features of the history of the United States, for
instance, are slavery and the crushing of the Indians. They are far
more ashamed than proud of the civilization that produced them, and
they see themselves as standing apart from it. They tend to see the Anglosphere’s
tradition of liberty and law as a sort of scam designed to preserve
the power and possessions of the ruling class. Their rhetoric generally seems more that of
rebels seeking to overthrow an oppressor than of citizens seeking the improvement of
an order of which they are members and inheritors.
The inheritors, and also the
beneficiaries: it is no secret that over the past several decades
many of these quasi-revolutionaries have found themselves very
comfortably situated in the academy, in the entertainment industry, in journalism, and in government. Especially in the first two of these, they exercise influence
far greater than would be suggested by their numbers. And they’ve
had a fair amount of success: it’s now quite common to hear
people of no particular sense or education toss off secular-leftist
platitudes as readily as others might say “God bless America!”
Well, all this is pretty
well-known, and I’m pretty sure I’m repeating things I’ve said before. But I’ve
been thinking about it in relation to Stein’s “profound
consequences.” There’s a disconnect between the vision of
the radical critics, which holds their civilization to be
fundamentally corrupt—racist, imperialist, sexist, etc.—and
their complacency about their own position in it. They act as if
their own prosperity, security, and liberty have no connection to the
history of the country that produced them—as if it had just
somehow appeared, a pure product of nature like rain and sunlight, to
which they have a natural right. There is sometimes, at least in the
younger sort of radical, a sense of guilt about this, but it appears
to diminish with age, perhaps still making itself felt but being
directed outward, resulting in an intensification of the critique.
Moreover, there is an assumption
that they can continue to propagate the idea that contemporary Western prosperity,
security, and liberty are the fruit of a poisonous root which must be
yanked out of the ground and destroyed, and yet continue to enjoy
those same fruits. Well, it doesn’t work that way with plants,
and I don’t think it works that way with societies, either.
Maybe this is partly just a swing
of the pendulum, a needed correction to the natural tendency of any nation or culture
to ignore the dark side of its own history.
I’d like to think so. And I should note that I’m speaking
in worldly terms here. From the most important point of view, that of
the spiritual fate of mankind, it is certainly arguable that the
worldly goods which the Anglosphere has excelled in procuring are
serving now to pull people in the direction of hell. If so, then it
will be a good thing if we lose them. But we shouldn’t have any
illusions about what that will mean.
What if the broad order of which
Steyn speaks really is by and large the work of the Anglosphere, and
its internal critics succeed in demoralizing it to the point where
its best institutions are no longer respected and cultivated? Take a
good look at most of the rest of the world, and ask yourself if you
really want to make Euro-American societies more like it. This
doesn’t mean that we have nothing to learn from the rest of the world—quite
the opposite is true—but I think most of us, even the more
alienated, really would prefer to keep our basic institutions. Certainly
there is no substantial migration out of Europe, America, Australia, et.al. And
those institutions are in turn dependent on a huge number of cultural habits and
presumptions, ways of thinking that have roots in Europe generally
and in the Anglosphere specifically. Our idea of citizenship, for
instance, is by no means a feature of all societies. It is under
attack in many ways, of which the radical critique is only
one—self-indulgence, aka consumerism, is another—but
without it our representative institutions will inevitably fail.
Sometime in the late ‘70s
or so, when the economy was looking bad and the Reagan-era reaction
against government social programs was beginning, someone (perhaps
Reagan himself), speaking of the capitalist economy as the goose
that laid golden eggs, observed that it was time to stop arguing
about how to divide up the eggs and start worrying about the health
of the goose. Something similar might be said now about our political
health and stability, upon which so much else depends: it’s
time to stop arguing about who is going to get the best rooms in the
house, and start worrying about the cracks in the foundation and the
leaks in the roof.
In my view what the Anglosphere requires for its
renewal can only be provided by the Catholic Church. But that’s another topic.
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